This "unfashionable" argument Wilson refers to is the inevitable backlash against the earlier and equally absurd argument that evolution is a force placed in motion by God with the express purpose of ultimately creating sentient life that is, us. In fact, evolution is a spontaneous process that acts purely through the agent of random mutation. Any given mutation in principle is just as likely to create greater order and complexity as it is to regress to more primitive and simpler states.
God has cleverly created this process only to the same extent that He cleverly created the laws of physics that govern our universe very clever laws, indeed, to have allowed the spontaneous creation of the breathtaking order, beauty, and complexity that we see around us! Indeed, if you may forgive my foray into theology, how can one tell the difference between God creating the entire universe by hand in one broad stroke over a period of seven days, and God "merely" writing a handful of almost inconceivably precisely tuned laws, then setting the universe in motion with a judiciously placed Big Bang? If the former, then God clearly went to extraordinary efforts to make sure every atom and quark He brought into existence obeys His laws perfectly; He arranged these parts with such inscrutably perfect subterfuge that we to this day haven't found a single verifiable case of one that can't have plausibly originated in the Big Bang. It seems to me, in the end, that it becomes a question of semantics. If your faith requires you to believe one and reject the other, it really makes no difference practically speaking: howsoever the universe was created, in either case it manifestly obeys the same immutable laws.